Skinner, Martin

SECRET CITY FILM COLLECTION
ORAL HISTORY OF MARTIN SKINNER
Interviewed by Keith McDaniel
February 6, 2005
MR. MCDANIEL: Well, tell me where you came from and how you ended up in Oak Ridge. MR. SKINNER: Well, I’m originally from Michigan, but Uncle Sam called and I traveled around and was at Louisiana State University for a while, and Washington State University in St. Louis, and the Army shipped me here to Oak Ridge. We arrived here in Knoxville, and as I recall, we didn’t even know where we were. They put us in covered trucks and hauled us out, and finally dumped us in front of what was sort of like an orderly room at an Army camp, and then we were here. MR. MCDANIEL: So what was your background in? MR. SKINNER: Background in electrical engineering. I started out in Michigan as a Chemical Engineer, but got switched over and one of my choices while I was in the Army, switched to electrical. And so, they brought me in here to do maintenance work on the electrical systems of the separators. MR. MCDANIEL: When did you come, when did you get here? MR. SKINNER: It was probably the first week of September of 1944. MR. MCDANIEL: Ok, so when you got here, tell me your impressions. MR. SKINNER: Well, it was a long time ago, but you know, it was sort of a madhouse. We were living in some of those hutments, and all the mud, and we had to have the wooden sidewalks there to get around. And when we went out to work, they loaded us in these, what we called cattle cars, a big almost semi, with hardly any windows, and took us out to the plant. We went through and put on company clothes, in fact, some of the people I worked with who were civilians, didn’t know I was in the Army, until we bumped into each other up in Town Site and I was in uniform. But I was assigned to one of the crews up there, another Army fellow and myself worked together. And, we just did whatever was necessary on the maintenance of the electrical equipment on the calutrons. I was in building 924-1. MR. MCDANIEL: And that was a beta building, or an alpha building? MR. SKINNER: It was a beta-1 building. MR. MCDANIEL: So tell me what did you do specifically for maintenance? MR. SKINNER: Well, all of these pieces of equipment, or a good many of them have a large number of vacuum tubes, and they blew out or burnt out. It was our job to replace them, as fast as we could, to get the unit back on line. There were two major high voltage sources, and several lower voltages sources, and we just had to do that. We had all the equipment in what we called a cubicle, and we could just barely get past it. I’m not sure I could get through there anymore. But we had our key to open the door, and a grounding hook to be sure we didn’t get electrocuted, and in we’d go to make the replacement we needed. Another job that this buddy of mine had with me, is that occasionally the Engineering Department would come up with some changes that they wanted made. So we were sort of given the job of installing the first one to see if it really worked. And sometimes they did and sometimes they didn’t. We’d work shiftwork in the initial days, and so I got a little touch of that as I went along. MR. MCDANIEL: Now, how long did it take, how many worked at a time on changing those vacuum tubes and how long would it take you? MR. SKINNER: Well, probably, the order of 15 minutes on some of them and maybe half an hour on the others. I just really don’t remember specifically, but that’s my recollection. MR. MCDANIEL: And in Beta-1, how many calutrons and control cubicles were there? MR. SKINNER: Well, there were two so-called “race tracks” and each had 36 units. 18 on one side and 18 around the corner, and there was a cubicle for each one of those. So each control room had 36 cubicles. MR. MCDANIEL: How often would those vacuum tubes go out? MR. SKINNER: Well, you’d run a series of a week, and you’d have a lot of them. And then you’d go a couple of weeks and you’d have very few. So we were just there and whenever something happened, we had to jump to it and do something about it. MR. MCDANIEL: How big were they? MR. SKINNER: The tubes for the real high-voltage sources were roughly two feet high and eight or nine inches in diameter, so they took up a lot of room. They were big. Some of the other tubes were a mercury vapor-type tube, which are much smaller for the lower voltage sources. MR. MCDANIEL: So when you came to Oak Ridge, were you married at the time? MR. SKINNER: No, no, I didn’t get married until I got out of the Army. So I say they picked me directly up out of Michigan State University in Michigan, hauled me out to Chicago, and then to Wichita Falls, Texas, and then finally to Baton Rouge to LSU [Louisiana State University]. MR. MCDANIEL: So when you came here, did you live in the Army barracks or did you live with the general population? MR. SKINNER: There were four of us assigned to one of the hutments. I don’t know, I don’t remember the dimension of them, something like 12x12 hutments, a little kerosene stove in the middle, and four bunks, and four foot lockers. So, this buddy of mine we were together in that, and the two others worked in different places in the plant. MR. MCDANIEL: So what was it like living in that close quarters? MR. SKINNER: Well, you just got used to it. We’d been in barracks before I got into the schooling system, and then in dormitories at LSU, so you were somewhat used to confined spaces. MR. MCDANIEL: Where was the hutment located? MR. SKINNER: There, about where Downtown Oak Ridge is now. It was quite forested and there were just rows and rows of hutments. MR. MCDANIEL: Did you have like a bathhouse? MR. SKINNER: Yes, there was a central bathhouse, and I can’t remember how many it served, something like eight hutments. It may have been more than that, but, that’s my remembrance. MR. MCDANIEL: And I guess there were just rows and rows of those hutments, weren’t there? MR. SKINNER: Yes, ours was an E, and I don’t know whether this was… So I presume there was at least an A, B, C, D, and at least an E, and ours was the number eight in that, so there were a good many of them there. MR. MCDANIEL: What was life like, like you said, a lot of people didn’t even realize you were in the Army until they saw you outside of work? MR. SKINNER: Well, people really outside, like relatives, they’d try to send me something, and Oak Ridge wasn’t known. And they ended up putting “near Knoxville” and things would get to me. You know, a cake with popcorn around it to cushion the blows, and letters and things like that. We had a typical PX, and then we had our cafeteria. You’d sleep a while, and get up and eat, and go to work, and come back and sleep a while, and start the process all over again. MR. MCDANIEL: Was the, in your part of the SED [Special Engineer Detachment], so how many SED were there here at that time, do you know? MR. SKINNER: Well, a little over 2,000, I believe. I have a book that shows all of them. We’ve had some reunions since, I think they’ve stopped that because the numbers have gotten so small to not justify bringing people together. But it was 2,000 or 2,200 or something like that. MR. MCDANIEL: So did you all have separate things that you had to do as a group, or were you just kind of mixed in with the general population and you just kind of did your job, or did you have special military procedures? MR. SKINNER: Once, our sole work was in the plants, and we just worked side-by-side with civilians. MR. MCDANIEL: Did you have officers that oversaw you in the military, or did you just… MR. SKINNER: There were some, but we didn’t have much contact with them. They were just for set up/overall policy things, and so I rarely had any contact with anybody above a sergeant. MR. MCDANIEL: So we were talking about, did you ever have an occasion to come across, or run into, or meet any of the high-level military people from the Manhattan Project? MR. SKINNER: I did not, because of my position. I’m sure that some of the people around them did, but I didn’t. It was just, as I say, go to work, and get home, go to sleep, get up, eat a bit, go back to work. MR. MCDANIEL: Give me a sense of what it was, the environment, and the energy was like, when you were working in Beta-1. MR. SKINNER: Well, it was a very high-level energy because of the need for keeping those units running. They had operators, mostly women, running the controls, and any outage was very detrimental. So when something happened, everybody scurried. It was just a continuous routine. But sometimes, thing were hectic: you had a cable go out and had to be putting in a new cable, and that was a major operation, but you had to get it done and quickly. MR. MCDANIEL: Now was everything set up individually where each cubicle could be shut down by itself and it wouldn’t affect anything? MR. SKINNER: Yes, yes, each cubicle could be, it was connected with one separator, and you could shut them down separately. And that way, when a run was finished, that would be shut down, the material would move, cleaned up, and a new batch started, and brought on to light. MR. MCDANIEL: Did you have to do anything, when that batch was done, and they pulled the calutron? Did you have to do any maintenance on that cubicle, if it was running good, did you just leave it alone? MR. SKINNER: If it was running good, you just didn’t. But if there were some routine things, as I recall, occasionally we would routinely go in and change new tubes, put in new tubes, while the down time, while we had down time, just so we wouldn’t have to do it during a run. MR. MCDANIEL: Where did the tubes come from, who made the tubes? MR. SKINNER: I’m just guessing, GE [General Electric], or, but I really don’t know, or I don’t remember. I obviously saw the label on them, but it didn’t make any impression on me. MR. MCDANIEL: The reason I ask is, I think I told you, I was able to go in the Beta-3 not too long ago, and I went down in the basement and there were still some tubes down there packed in cases. And not many tubes, but there were some insulators, big white insulators, they have cases and cases of those, still boxed up, sitting down there in the basement of Beta 3, and big old rolls of cables and such, says, “Deliver to AEC [Atomic Energy Commission], September, 1944,” stamped on it. MR. SKINNER: I didn’t realize they still had that material. MR. MCDANIEL: A lot of it, I guess they just kept. MR. SKINNER: Well, I do remember that there was a period of time when they had shut down the Alpha buildings, and when they knew that some of the Army people were going to be discharged. They put us over there putting everything in standby. They had us painting everything with gray paint. They had no ladders. So it was only painted up as far as you could reach, on conduit and all sorts of piping, so I guess they hoped, thought maybe that they’d have to start them up again one day, but I guess they never did. MR. MCDANIEL: Tell me, do you have any interesting stories or anything, instances that you can remember, about those early days, either at the plant, or just regular daily life? MR. SKINNER: Well, whenever we had a long weekend, a bunch of us usually went up to the mountains. One of the fellows had a car, and we’d climb in and take a whole group up there, and we’d stay at one of them, a hotels, and they’d pack us a sack lunch for a dollar, and we’d go up in the mountains. Of course, once you’re on the road, you could hitchhike and people would pick you up and take you anywhere you wanted, and those were some interesting days. Then, as I told you earlier, I had this idea of how to shorten the maintenance on one set of tubes for one of the power supplies, just a clip instead of bolts. I was awarded a $50 reward for it, but then I couldn’t get it because I was in the Army. I still have the old pieces I made at that time, of those clips. MR. MCDANIEL: So, did they switch over to those clips? MR. SKINNER: No, they didn’t. They didn’t. Like many prizes and improvement things, it never got installed. The momentum of changing is just too difficult. MR. MCDANIEL: Who was it who awarded you the $50? MR. SKINNER: It was Eastman, who were running the plant at that time, a major contractor in the plant. And so, then it was posted on the bulletin board, and then I got called in by the military, and they said, “Well, that’s nice, but you can’t have that money.” MR. MCDANIEL: $50 was a lot back then! MR. SKINNER: Oh yes it was a lot! MR. MCDANIEL: My goodness. Anything else you can remember? MR. SKINNER: Well, not really. I remember during the summertime when it was so hot, those buildings were not air-conditioned. They had put in huge fans in front of all the cubicles, and down the alleyway, and you know. We took off as much clothes as we dared take off, and the operators rolled up their shirts, one of the beginnings of bare midriffs, I think, and just anyway to keep cool. MR. MCDANIEL: Because it was so hot. And I guess the equipment generated a lot of heat too? MR. SKINNER: Oh yes, because the, see, one of the high voltage was a minus-50,000 or higher KV, and the other one was a plus-50,000 or more, and so those two, they put out an awful lot of heat. MR. MCDANIEL: My goodness. Well, what about just, life, and living in the hutment, where did you all eat, at the cafeteria? MR. SKINNER: Yeah, we ate at the cafeteria. Occasionally, once that some of the people we were working with, knew we were in the Army, they’d invite us out for dinner. And, you know, Sunday dinner, is about the best time for us to be off. We’d play basketball. I was on one of the Army basketball teams. We called ourselves the “Little Stinkers” because I think we were always at the bottom of the list. We bowled a little bit, and we played softball a little bit. Just the sort of things you can fill in the hours with. There was always a continuous poker game going, as well as a bridge game, and people would get up and go to work and someone would sit down and take their place, and it would just go on and on and on. MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right. Where did they have the poker and bridge games? MR. SKINNER: Well, down in the PX, or later on, toward the end, they did move us to dormitories, in the West end of Oak Ridge, and a big community room in those dormitories was used, but as I say, people would come and go, and I don’t think the games ever stopped. MR. MCDANIEL: One of the ladies that I interviewed said that it was good to date a soldier, because they could get things at the PX that the general population couldn’t get. MR. SKINNER: Oh yes, everything was available. People with hearing aids on the outside had a difficult time getting batteries. And, so they were available at the PX, and I know that some of them probably went from there into civilian hands, but that’s the way things worked in those days. MR. MCDANIEL: Where was the PX? MR. SKINNER: It was right, not too far from where our hutments were. And it was right, I can’t remember whether it was part of the cafeteria or whether it was a separate building, but right by the cafeteria as I remember. MR. MCDANIEL: What did they tell you when you came to work here, about what the project was? MR. SKINNER: They told us nothing. We had an orientation that said, “You’re going to be working with electrical equipment. It’s very dangerous. Be very careful.” And then they sent us out to the plant. I personally didn’t know what they were doing until the test bomb was exploded out west. Our supervisor got us together and explained to us. Really, I didn’t understand much of it then, because I didn’t know much of the physics, but I could then could see the reason for some of the things we were doing. Now, some of the people who were working in the chemistry field, they pretty much knew what was going on, because they had to learn the chemistry of uranium. MR. MCDANIEL: Most of the people had no idea until it was announced. MR. SKINNER: No, nobody. And as you’ve probably heard, any visitor had to have a badge to come in to Oak Ridge. They inspected cars for guns and booze and everything, and I can’t even, I’m not sure of what gate I came into, because we were in these covered trucks. I think it was through Solway, but I’m not sure, until they dumped us out in the middle of Oak Ridge. MR. MCDANIEL: So they dumped you out and told you where you needed to go. MR. SKINNER: When we left the Washington University in St. Louis, I think the person that had our shipping orders probably knew where we were going, but the rest of us had no idea where we were going. So, as I say, we ended up in the L&N station and put on trucks, and out we came. MR. MCDANIEL: Now, how many was in your group that came with you from… MR. SKINNER: Twnety-five, I think. They were the same group, we’d been together at Louisiana State University. And I know down there, they had pared all of the engineering groups down to 25. And that was one of my fortunate things, having chosen electrical engineering, there were not many more than 25, so only the people at the bottom of the class list went off someplace else. Or in chemical engineering, they took a great cut to get down to 25, so only the very top people in chemical engineering remained at LSU. MR. MCDANIEL: Now, were you drafted, or did you join the service? MR. SKINNER: Well, shortly after Pearl Harbor, they made a big announcement, “Join the Enlisted Reserve and stay in school.” I stayed for three months, and they called up the Enlisted Reserve. And as I said, then we went to Chicago, then to Sheppard Field at Wichita Falls, Texas. And at that time, it was called Sheppard Field, but it wasn’t a field. It was, well, it was a big area covered with umpteen barracks and about 100,000 GI’s. MR. MCDANIEL: And so, but when you were there, were you in school? MR. SKINNER: Well, it was while we were at Wichita Falls and Sheppard Field, we found out about a training program that the Army had called a specialized engineering, specialized training program. And we signed up for that, you know, anything to get out of basic training. And so, lo and behold, we went, ultimately got to LSU. And that was a lovely campus, through the nice parts of the year, got kind of cold and wet during the winter time. MR. MCDANIEL: Well, did you meet your wife in Oak Ridge, or was it after? MR. SKINNER: No, well, we met, well, we crossed paths when we were a year and a half, two-years-old. Her father was our minister in Michigan, and the families were very close, so I had known her since we were two or two and a half-years-old. We got married in August of ‘46 after I got through the Army, and a short stint down here in Oak Ridge. Went back to Michigan and got my degree. The best job I could find after I got my degree, was coming back and doing exactly the same work I’d been doing down here. So we came back. MR. MCDANIEL: So you came back and stayed. MR. SKINNER: So we’ve been in this area, we lived in Oak Ridge for a while, and then moved out to Kingston, and now, sort of out in the county. MR. MCDANIEL: So you left here, you left to go back to Michigan when, in… MR. SKINNER: In ‘46. MR. MCDANIEL: And when’d you come back? MR. SKINNER: In July 1st, ‘48. And we were in sort of an apartment they had in one of the dormitories for a while. Then we moved to, well, I can’t remember the name of the street, in near the street near the hospital, and then we moved up in California after that. MR. MCDANIEL: Well, anything else you want to mention, any other interesting stories, or scientific information you want to talk about? MR. SKINNER: Nothing comes to mind, but I hadn’t really been giving much extra thought about what we’d be covering today. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. How precise did the calutrons have to operate? I mean, was it within a range of kind of a broad range that everything could be adjusted to, or did it have to be very precise… MR. SKINNER: It was very, very narrow. The receiver for getting the product uranium was just a few millimeters, and you had to keep that beam of the 235 centered on that. So it was very critical for any, for temperature, for any voltage change. And so, that was the duty of the operator. She sat there with a meter in front of her, and she knew about where the maximum size of the beam was, and she had to keep all these adjustments to keep that beam right there. It was the only way they could get the high purity of the uranium 235. MR. MCDANIEL: And it was my understanding that most of those operators were young women, and you were a young soldier, and you had to work around them all day. What was that like? MR. SKINNER: You know, I guess maybe I was strange, but anyway, it didn’t bother me particularly. You got friendlier with some than you did others, just because of their nature. And you talk with them, and when you’re sitting around doing nothing and they’re not too busy, well, you’d chat with them, but there was no off the job fraternization at all. (Pause) But they did come, they came from everywhere, you know. It was the only way that they could get people in there, enough people there. That’s why they brought the Army in, is because they couldn’t bring enough people in from outside to operate all of the facilities. MR. MCDANIEL: Now, did the, in ‘44, did the, were the calutrons running 24 hours a day? There was about year in there when they were running 24 hours a day… MR. SKINNER: Beta-1 was running full-time when I got there. If I remember correctly, it just recently had gotten to that level. Then they built and were building Beta 2, 3 and 4, and they came online later. But when I got there, Beta 1 was running full-time, and the Alpha buildings had all been shut down. MR. MCDANIEL: So the Alpha buildings had been shut down because, let me make sure I understand this, was K-25 at this point operational? MR. SKINNER: They were just beginning to be, if I recall correctly. We didn’t know what was going on in any of the plants, so I really don’t know. But the Alpha building was doing the preliminary separation, and their product then came to the Beta system. But when I got there, I think the Alpha buildings were either all shut down or about to shut down. MR. MCDANIEL: Because I know that at some point, K-25 was doing preliminary separation and then fading it back to the Beta buildings. MR. SKINNER: And their product ultimately was such, that the Beta buildings were shut down. MR. MCDANIEL: So you were here until ‘46, did you say? So you were here until after the war was over. So what happened, I mean I know you said you went back to Michigan, but you were discharged… MR. SKINNER: I was discharged in the spring of ’46. I worked a short time, oh, three or four months, and I worked a short time in the pilot plant building at Y-12, where they’d done a lot of the initial work. We were beginning then to study separating other isotopes of stable elements, and isotopes such as iron, nickel, and those sorts that were being used for medical purposes. So I began working on that type of equipment. More on, they were using the standard electrical equipment, so I was more in the mechanical helping assemble some of the extra operation of that. And that’s what I did when I came back in ‘48. I went back into 9766, the pilot plant, and we were working more on separating the stable isotopes, and various things. MR. MCDANIEL: When did you do that I mean, what’d you do the rest… MR. SKINNER: Did that, oh, when was it, sometime in 1950, I guess it was. One morning the boss called me in and said, “We’re having budget problems. We’ve made two lists, one has the names of the people we cannot do without, and you’re on the other list. But we’ve arranged for an interview for you.” So I guess that very day or maybe the next day, I was interviewed for a job in the Law Department. I didn’t know anything about the law or anything else, but the Law Department was operating the patent offices at the various plants. So, they offered me a job and I took it because you know, you always take a job when you don’t have anything else, and figured I’d do it until I found something better. So it was sometime in ‘50 that I was assigned then to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory running the Patent Department. I was it. I had a part-time secretary, and that started in ’50, and I was on that job until I retired at the end of 1980. So we ultimately developed that Department, and it’s, I think it’s, I think there were four people when I retired. MR. MCDANIEL: Ok, so, in ‘50, they, you took a job in the Law Department at the Lab, Ok, and you stayed there until you retired. So what did you do there, what was your job? MR. SKINNER: Well, during that, in those years, all of the rights to any development belonged to the government, either the AEC or whatever the, all the different names that it had. And our job was to locate things, information on things we thought might be of interest to them for patent protection. And then we assisted them in getting the information for the preparation of the patent applications and handling thereafter. In addition, we had to review all of the documents that were going out to the public to be sure that there wasn’t any advance disclosure of technology that fit in that category of patent material. At the ORNL [Oak Ridge National Laboratory], they produced a huge amount of publications, and I guess that was probably the reason I took retirement, was that I just got overwhelmed with having to read, and not having time to do anything constructive myself. MR. MCDANIEL: What were some of the most memorable items that came through your office that people may, not only the scientific community, but the public might know something about some item or another. MR. SKINNER: Well, we did a lot of work on the major processes for separating uranium from the products that are generated from fission. We did patent work on some of the detectors that are for radiation. We were involved in some of the early stages of some of these crystals that are used, still used, for detectors. Those are the ones that first come to mind. I’ve done some work on the outside since, on what I considered significant inventions, but they were not while I was in Oak Ridge, because I went to work for another private firm after I retired in Oak Ridge, and then retired from them, because my wife said I flunked retirement the first time. MR. MCDANIEL: Where did you go to work after you retired? MR. SKINNER: A firm of Pitts and Britton in Knoxville. And I mean, I wrote the patent applications for the iPix technology, I wrote the patent applications for many of the positions sensors that, like are used in touch sensors, that are used all over the world. Those were interesting to work on. MR. MCDANIEL: Well, anything else you can think of that you want to talk about a little bit? MR. SKINNER: No, I can’t really think, I don’t know. MR. MCDANIEL: I think you’ve given me a lot of information, you know, it’s good to just kind of have your perspective and kind of your story, so I know there’s much more to it than that, but this is kind of the highlights. MR. SKINNER: Well, as I said, that happened a long time ago, and even that write up that I made during the Army days, just for basically for family history, that was written many, many years ago. Each time I look at it, I think of something that’s not quite correct or I forgot, and the more you write, the more you think. MR. MCDANIEL: Where did you all live in Kingston? MR. SKINNER: Well, we lived on the lake right behind Mama Mia’s. Back on Nelson Drive, there’s a dead end over there, we’d gone down. We’d been living in Oak Ridge up on California, and we were about to outgrow the house. This was a B house and we’ve got a boy and a girl. So I was working for a man called Bill Harwell. He was the mayor of Kingston for a while. Anyway, he was my boss. We were looking for a place, we looked in Norris, and we looked out in Edgemore area, and he said, “Well, why don’t you come down to Kingston?” So we went down there one Sunday, and the real estate agent drove us around. She drove us around that little street, she looked at this lot, and said, “Well, that’s awfully steep, I don’t think you’d like it.” Well, that was Sunday, and on Monday, I took my shovel back, and it was real good dirt, and I bought it on Monday. We lived there for 39 years, and then we moved out, we’re out on the lake near Midtown now. [End of Interview]

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SECRET CITY FILM COLLECTION
ORAL HISTORY OF MARTIN SKINNER
Interviewed by Keith McDaniel
February 6, 2005
MR. MCDANIEL: Well, tell me where you came from and how you ended up in Oak Ridge. MR. SKINNER: Well, I’m originally from Michigan, but Uncle Sam called and I traveled around and was at Louisiana State University for a while, and Washington State University in St. Louis, and the Army shipped me here to Oak Ridge. We arrived here in Knoxville, and as I recall, we didn’t even know where we were. They put us in covered trucks and hauled us out, and finally dumped us in front of what was sort of like an orderly room at an Army camp, and then we were here. MR. MCDANIEL: So what was your background in? MR. SKINNER: Background in electrical engineering. I started out in Michigan as a Chemical Engineer, but got switched over and one of my choices while I was in the Army, switched to electrical. And so, they brought me in here to do maintenance work on the electrical systems of the separators. MR. MCDANIEL: When did you come, when did you get here? MR. SKINNER: It was probably the first week of September of 1944. MR. MCDANIEL: Ok, so when you got here, tell me your impressions. MR. SKINNER: Well, it was a long time ago, but you know, it was sort of a madhouse. We were living in some of those hutments, and all the mud, and we had to have the wooden sidewalks there to get around. And when we went out to work, they loaded us in these, what we called cattle cars, a big almost semi, with hardly any windows, and took us out to the plant. We went through and put on company clothes, in fact, some of the people I worked with who were civilians, didn’t know I was in the Army, until we bumped into each other up in Town Site and I was in uniform. But I was assigned to one of the crews up there, another Army fellow and myself worked together. And, we just did whatever was necessary on the maintenance of the electrical equipment on the calutrons. I was in building 924-1. MR. MCDANIEL: And that was a beta building, or an alpha building? MR. SKINNER: It was a beta-1 building. MR. MCDANIEL: So tell me what did you do specifically for maintenance? MR. SKINNER: Well, all of these pieces of equipment, or a good many of them have a large number of vacuum tubes, and they blew out or burnt out. It was our job to replace them, as fast as we could, to get the unit back on line. There were two major high voltage sources, and several lower voltages sources, and we just had to do that. We had all the equipment in what we called a cubicle, and we could just barely get past it. I’m not sure I could get through there anymore. But we had our key to open the door, and a grounding hook to be sure we didn’t get electrocuted, and in we’d go to make the replacement we needed. Another job that this buddy of mine had with me, is that occasionally the Engineering Department would come up with some changes that they wanted made. So we were sort of given the job of installing the first one to see if it really worked. And sometimes they did and sometimes they didn’t. We’d work shiftwork in the initial days, and so I got a little touch of that as I went along. MR. MCDANIEL: Now, how long did it take, how many worked at a time on changing those vacuum tubes and how long would it take you? MR. SKINNER: Well, probably, the order of 15 minutes on some of them and maybe half an hour on the others. I just really don’t remember specifically, but that’s my recollection. MR. MCDANIEL: And in Beta-1, how many calutrons and control cubicles were there? MR. SKINNER: Well, there were two so-called “race tracks” and each had 36 units. 18 on one side and 18 around the corner, and there was a cubicle for each one of those. So each control room had 36 cubicles. MR. MCDANIEL: How often would those vacuum tubes go out? MR. SKINNER: Well, you’d run a series of a week, and you’d have a lot of them. And then you’d go a couple of weeks and you’d have very few. So we were just there and whenever something happened, we had to jump to it and do something about it. MR. MCDANIEL: How big were they? MR. SKINNER: The tubes for the real high-voltage sources were roughly two feet high and eight or nine inches in diameter, so they took up a lot of room. They were big. Some of the other tubes were a mercury vapor-type tube, which are much smaller for the lower voltage sources. MR. MCDANIEL: So when you came to Oak Ridge, were you married at the time? MR. SKINNER: No, no, I didn’t get married until I got out of the Army. So I say they picked me directly up out of Michigan State University in Michigan, hauled me out to Chicago, and then to Wichita Falls, Texas, and then finally to Baton Rouge to LSU [Louisiana State University]. MR. MCDANIEL: So when you came here, did you live in the Army barracks or did you live with the general population? MR. SKINNER: There were four of us assigned to one of the hutments. I don’t know, I don’t remember the dimension of them, something like 12x12 hutments, a little kerosene stove in the middle, and four bunks, and four foot lockers. So, this buddy of mine we were together in that, and the two others worked in different places in the plant. MR. MCDANIEL: So what was it like living in that close quarters? MR. SKINNER: Well, you just got used to it. We’d been in barracks before I got into the schooling system, and then in dormitories at LSU, so you were somewhat used to confined spaces. MR. MCDANIEL: Where was the hutment located? MR. SKINNER: There, about where Downtown Oak Ridge is now. It was quite forested and there were just rows and rows of hutments. MR. MCDANIEL: Did you have like a bathhouse? MR. SKINNER: Yes, there was a central bathhouse, and I can’t remember how many it served, something like eight hutments. It may have been more than that, but, that’s my remembrance. MR. MCDANIEL: And I guess there were just rows and rows of those hutments, weren’t there? MR. SKINNER: Yes, ours was an E, and I don’t know whether this was… So I presume there was at least an A, B, C, D, and at least an E, and ours was the number eight in that, so there were a good many of them there. MR. MCDANIEL: What was life like, like you said, a lot of people didn’t even realize you were in the Army until they saw you outside of work? MR. SKINNER: Well, people really outside, like relatives, they’d try to send me something, and Oak Ridge wasn’t known. And they ended up putting “near Knoxville” and things would get to me. You know, a cake with popcorn around it to cushion the blows, and letters and things like that. We had a typical PX, and then we had our cafeteria. You’d sleep a while, and get up and eat, and go to work, and come back and sleep a while, and start the process all over again. MR. MCDANIEL: Was the, in your part of the SED [Special Engineer Detachment], so how many SED were there here at that time, do you know? MR. SKINNER: Well, a little over 2,000, I believe. I have a book that shows all of them. We’ve had some reunions since, I think they’ve stopped that because the numbers have gotten so small to not justify bringing people together. But it was 2,000 or 2,200 or something like that. MR. MCDANIEL: So did you all have separate things that you had to do as a group, or were you just kind of mixed in with the general population and you just kind of did your job, or did you have special military procedures? MR. SKINNER: Once, our sole work was in the plants, and we just worked side-by-side with civilians. MR. MCDANIEL: Did you have officers that oversaw you in the military, or did you just… MR. SKINNER: There were some, but we didn’t have much contact with them. They were just for set up/overall policy things, and so I rarely had any contact with anybody above a sergeant. MR. MCDANIEL: So we were talking about, did you ever have an occasion to come across, or run into, or meet any of the high-level military people from the Manhattan Project? MR. SKINNER: I did not, because of my position. I’m sure that some of the people around them did, but I didn’t. It was just, as I say, go to work, and get home, go to sleep, get up, eat a bit, go back to work. MR. MCDANIEL: Give me a sense of what it was, the environment, and the energy was like, when you were working in Beta-1. MR. SKINNER: Well, it was a very high-level energy because of the need for keeping those units running. They had operators, mostly women, running the controls, and any outage was very detrimental. So when something happened, everybody scurried. It was just a continuous routine. But sometimes, thing were hectic: you had a cable go out and had to be putting in a new cable, and that was a major operation, but you had to get it done and quickly. MR. MCDANIEL: Now was everything set up individually where each cubicle could be shut down by itself and it wouldn’t affect anything? MR. SKINNER: Yes, yes, each cubicle could be, it was connected with one separator, and you could shut them down separately. And that way, when a run was finished, that would be shut down, the material would move, cleaned up, and a new batch started, and brought on to light. MR. MCDANIEL: Did you have to do anything, when that batch was done, and they pulled the calutron? Did you have to do any maintenance on that cubicle, if it was running good, did you just leave it alone? MR. SKINNER: If it was running good, you just didn’t. But if there were some routine things, as I recall, occasionally we would routinely go in and change new tubes, put in new tubes, while the down time, while we had down time, just so we wouldn’t have to do it during a run. MR. MCDANIEL: Where did the tubes come from, who made the tubes? MR. SKINNER: I’m just guessing, GE [General Electric], or, but I really don’t know, or I don’t remember. I obviously saw the label on them, but it didn’t make any impression on me. MR. MCDANIEL: The reason I ask is, I think I told you, I was able to go in the Beta-3 not too long ago, and I went down in the basement and there were still some tubes down there packed in cases. And not many tubes, but there were some insulators, big white insulators, they have cases and cases of those, still boxed up, sitting down there in the basement of Beta 3, and big old rolls of cables and such, says, “Deliver to AEC [Atomic Energy Commission], September, 1944,” stamped on it. MR. SKINNER: I didn’t realize they still had that material. MR. MCDANIEL: A lot of it, I guess they just kept. MR. SKINNER: Well, I do remember that there was a period of time when they had shut down the Alpha buildings, and when they knew that some of the Army people were going to be discharged. They put us over there putting everything in standby. They had us painting everything with gray paint. They had no ladders. So it was only painted up as far as you could reach, on conduit and all sorts of piping, so I guess they hoped, thought maybe that they’d have to start them up again one day, but I guess they never did. MR. MCDANIEL: Tell me, do you have any interesting stories or anything, instances that you can remember, about those early days, either at the plant, or just regular daily life? MR. SKINNER: Well, whenever we had a long weekend, a bunch of us usually went up to the mountains. One of the fellows had a car, and we’d climb in and take a whole group up there, and we’d stay at one of them, a hotels, and they’d pack us a sack lunch for a dollar, and we’d go up in the mountains. Of course, once you’re on the road, you could hitchhike and people would pick you up and take you anywhere you wanted, and those were some interesting days. Then, as I told you earlier, I had this idea of how to shorten the maintenance on one set of tubes for one of the power supplies, just a clip instead of bolts. I was awarded a $50 reward for it, but then I couldn’t get it because I was in the Army. I still have the old pieces I made at that time, of those clips. MR. MCDANIEL: So, did they switch over to those clips? MR. SKINNER: No, they didn’t. They didn’t. Like many prizes and improvement things, it never got installed. The momentum of changing is just too difficult. MR. MCDANIEL: Who was it who awarded you the $50? MR. SKINNER: It was Eastman, who were running the plant at that time, a major contractor in the plant. And so, then it was posted on the bulletin board, and then I got called in by the military, and they said, “Well, that’s nice, but you can’t have that money.” MR. MCDANIEL: $50 was a lot back then! MR. SKINNER: Oh yes it was a lot! MR. MCDANIEL: My goodness. Anything else you can remember? MR. SKINNER: Well, not really. I remember during the summertime when it was so hot, those buildings were not air-conditioned. They had put in huge fans in front of all the cubicles, and down the alleyway, and you know. We took off as much clothes as we dared take off, and the operators rolled up their shirts, one of the beginnings of bare midriffs, I think, and just anyway to keep cool. MR. MCDANIEL: Because it was so hot. And I guess the equipment generated a lot of heat too? MR. SKINNER: Oh yes, because the, see, one of the high voltage was a minus-50,000 or higher KV, and the other one was a plus-50,000 or more, and so those two, they put out an awful lot of heat. MR. MCDANIEL: My goodness. Well, what about just, life, and living in the hutment, where did you all eat, at the cafeteria? MR. SKINNER: Yeah, we ate at the cafeteria. Occasionally, once that some of the people we were working with, knew we were in the Army, they’d invite us out for dinner. And, you know, Sunday dinner, is about the best time for us to be off. We’d play basketball. I was on one of the Army basketball teams. We called ourselves the “Little Stinkers” because I think we were always at the bottom of the list. We bowled a little bit, and we played softball a little bit. Just the sort of things you can fill in the hours with. There was always a continuous poker game going, as well as a bridge game, and people would get up and go to work and someone would sit down and take their place, and it would just go on and on and on. MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right. Where did they have the poker and bridge games? MR. SKINNER: Well, down in the PX, or later on, toward the end, they did move us to dormitories, in the West end of Oak Ridge, and a big community room in those dormitories was used, but as I say, people would come and go, and I don’t think the games ever stopped. MR. MCDANIEL: One of the ladies that I interviewed said that it was good to date a soldier, because they could get things at the PX that the general population couldn’t get. MR. SKINNER: Oh yes, everything was available. People with hearing aids on the outside had a difficult time getting batteries. And, so they were available at the PX, and I know that some of them probably went from there into civilian hands, but that’s the way things worked in those days. MR. MCDANIEL: Where was the PX? MR. SKINNER: It was right, not too far from where our hutments were. And it was right, I can’t remember whether it was part of the cafeteria or whether it was a separate building, but right by the cafeteria as I remember. MR. MCDANIEL: What did they tell you when you came to work here, about what the project was? MR. SKINNER: They told us nothing. We had an orientation that said, “You’re going to be working with electrical equipment. It’s very dangerous. Be very careful.” And then they sent us out to the plant. I personally didn’t know what they were doing until the test bomb was exploded out west. Our supervisor got us together and explained to us. Really, I didn’t understand much of it then, because I didn’t know much of the physics, but I could then could see the reason for some of the things we were doing. Now, some of the people who were working in the chemistry field, they pretty much knew what was going on, because they had to learn the chemistry of uranium. MR. MCDANIEL: Most of the people had no idea until it was announced. MR. SKINNER: No, nobody. And as you’ve probably heard, any visitor had to have a badge to come in to Oak Ridge. They inspected cars for guns and booze and everything, and I can’t even, I’m not sure of what gate I came into, because we were in these covered trucks. I think it was through Solway, but I’m not sure, until they dumped us out in the middle of Oak Ridge. MR. MCDANIEL: So they dumped you out and told you where you needed to go. MR. SKINNER: When we left the Washington University in St. Louis, I think the person that had our shipping orders probably knew where we were going, but the rest of us had no idea where we were going. So, as I say, we ended up in the L&N station and put on trucks, and out we came. MR. MCDANIEL: Now, how many was in your group that came with you from… MR. SKINNER: Twnety-five, I think. They were the same group, we’d been together at Louisiana State University. And I know down there, they had pared all of the engineering groups down to 25. And that was one of my fortunate things, having chosen electrical engineering, there were not many more than 25, so only the people at the bottom of the class list went off someplace else. Or in chemical engineering, they took a great cut to get down to 25, so only the very top people in chemical engineering remained at LSU. MR. MCDANIEL: Now, were you drafted, or did you join the service? MR. SKINNER: Well, shortly after Pearl Harbor, they made a big announcement, “Join the Enlisted Reserve and stay in school.” I stayed for three months, and they called up the Enlisted Reserve. And as I said, then we went to Chicago, then to Sheppard Field at Wichita Falls, Texas. And at that time, it was called Sheppard Field, but it wasn’t a field. It was, well, it was a big area covered with umpteen barracks and about 100,000 GI’s. MR. MCDANIEL: And so, but when you were there, were you in school? MR. SKINNER: Well, it was while we were at Wichita Falls and Sheppard Field, we found out about a training program that the Army had called a specialized engineering, specialized training program. And we signed up for that, you know, anything to get out of basic training. And so, lo and behold, we went, ultimately got to LSU. And that was a lovely campus, through the nice parts of the year, got kind of cold and wet during the winter time. MR. MCDANIEL: Well, did you meet your wife in Oak Ridge, or was it after? MR. SKINNER: No, well, we met, well, we crossed paths when we were a year and a half, two-years-old. Her father was our minister in Michigan, and the families were very close, so I had known her since we were two or two and a half-years-old. We got married in August of ‘46 after I got through the Army, and a short stint down here in Oak Ridge. Went back to Michigan and got my degree. The best job I could find after I got my degree, was coming back and doing exactly the same work I’d been doing down here. So we came back. MR. MCDANIEL: So you came back and stayed. MR. SKINNER: So we’ve been in this area, we lived in Oak Ridge for a while, and then moved out to Kingston, and now, sort of out in the county. MR. MCDANIEL: So you left here, you left to go back to Michigan when, in… MR. SKINNER: In ‘46. MR. MCDANIEL: And when’d you come back? MR. SKINNER: In July 1st, ‘48. And we were in sort of an apartment they had in one of the dormitories for a while. Then we moved to, well, I can’t remember the name of the street, in near the street near the hospital, and then we moved up in California after that. MR. MCDANIEL: Well, anything else you want to mention, any other interesting stories, or scientific information you want to talk about? MR. SKINNER: Nothing comes to mind, but I hadn’t really been giving much extra thought about what we’d be covering today. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. How precise did the calutrons have to operate? I mean, was it within a range of kind of a broad range that everything could be adjusted to, or did it have to be very precise… MR. SKINNER: It was very, very narrow. The receiver for getting the product uranium was just a few millimeters, and you had to keep that beam of the 235 centered on that. So it was very critical for any, for temperature, for any voltage change. And so, that was the duty of the operator. She sat there with a meter in front of her, and she knew about where the maximum size of the beam was, and she had to keep all these adjustments to keep that beam right there. It was the only way they could get the high purity of the uranium 235. MR. MCDANIEL: And it was my understanding that most of those operators were young women, and you were a young soldier, and you had to work around them all day. What was that like? MR. SKINNER: You know, I guess maybe I was strange, but anyway, it didn’t bother me particularly. You got friendlier with some than you did others, just because of their nature. And you talk with them, and when you’re sitting around doing nothing and they’re not too busy, well, you’d chat with them, but there was no off the job fraternization at all. (Pause) But they did come, they came from everywhere, you know. It was the only way that they could get people in there, enough people there. That’s why they brought the Army in, is because they couldn’t bring enough people in from outside to operate all of the facilities. MR. MCDANIEL: Now, did the, in ‘44, did the, were the calutrons running 24 hours a day? There was about year in there when they were running 24 hours a day… MR. SKINNER: Beta-1 was running full-time when I got there. If I remember correctly, it just recently had gotten to that level. Then they built and were building Beta 2, 3 and 4, and they came online later. But when I got there, Beta 1 was running full-time, and the Alpha buildings had all been shut down. MR. MCDANIEL: So the Alpha buildings had been shut down because, let me make sure I understand this, was K-25 at this point operational? MR. SKINNER: They were just beginning to be, if I recall correctly. We didn’t know what was going on in any of the plants, so I really don’t know. But the Alpha building was doing the preliminary separation, and their product then came to the Beta system. But when I got there, I think the Alpha buildings were either all shut down or about to shut down. MR. MCDANIEL: Because I know that at some point, K-25 was doing preliminary separation and then fading it back to the Beta buildings. MR. SKINNER: And their product ultimately was such, that the Beta buildings were shut down. MR. MCDANIEL: So you were here until ‘46, did you say? So you were here until after the war was over. So what happened, I mean I know you said you went back to Michigan, but you were discharged… MR. SKINNER: I was discharged in the spring of ’46. I worked a short time, oh, three or four months, and I worked a short time in the pilot plant building at Y-12, where they’d done a lot of the initial work. We were beginning then to study separating other isotopes of stable elements, and isotopes such as iron, nickel, and those sorts that were being used for medical purposes. So I began working on that type of equipment. More on, they were using the standard electrical equipment, so I was more in the mechanical helping assemble some of the extra operation of that. And that’s what I did when I came back in ‘48. I went back into 9766, the pilot plant, and we were working more on separating the stable isotopes, and various things. MR. MCDANIEL: When did you do that I mean, what’d you do the rest… MR. SKINNER: Did that, oh, when was it, sometime in 1950, I guess it was. One morning the boss called me in and said, “We’re having budget problems. We’ve made two lists, one has the names of the people we cannot do without, and you’re on the other list. But we’ve arranged for an interview for you.” So I guess that very day or maybe the next day, I was interviewed for a job in the Law Department. I didn’t know anything about the law or anything else, but the Law Department was operating the patent offices at the various plants. So, they offered me a job and I took it because you know, you always take a job when you don’t have anything else, and figured I’d do it until I found something better. So it was sometime in ‘50 that I was assigned then to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory running the Patent Department. I was it. I had a part-time secretary, and that started in ’50, and I was on that job until I retired at the end of 1980. So we ultimately developed that Department, and it’s, I think it’s, I think there were four people when I retired. MR. MCDANIEL: Ok, so, in ‘50, they, you took a job in the Law Department at the Lab, Ok, and you stayed there until you retired. So what did you do there, what was your job? MR. SKINNER: Well, during that, in those years, all of the rights to any development belonged to the government, either the AEC or whatever the, all the different names that it had. And our job was to locate things, information on things we thought might be of interest to them for patent protection. And then we assisted them in getting the information for the preparation of the patent applications and handling thereafter. In addition, we had to review all of the documents that were going out to the public to be sure that there wasn’t any advance disclosure of technology that fit in that category of patent material. At the ORNL [Oak Ridge National Laboratory], they produced a huge amount of publications, and I guess that was probably the reason I took retirement, was that I just got overwhelmed with having to read, and not having time to do anything constructive myself. MR. MCDANIEL: What were some of the most memorable items that came through your office that people may, not only the scientific community, but the public might know something about some item or another. MR. SKINNER: Well, we did a lot of work on the major processes for separating uranium from the products that are generated from fission. We did patent work on some of the detectors that are for radiation. We were involved in some of the early stages of some of these crystals that are used, still used, for detectors. Those are the ones that first come to mind. I’ve done some work on the outside since, on what I considered significant inventions, but they were not while I was in Oak Ridge, because I went to work for another private firm after I retired in Oak Ridge, and then retired from them, because my wife said I flunked retirement the first time. MR. MCDANIEL: Where did you go to work after you retired? MR. SKINNER: A firm of Pitts and Britton in Knoxville. And I mean, I wrote the patent applications for the iPix technology, I wrote the patent applications for many of the positions sensors that, like are used in touch sensors, that are used all over the world. Those were interesting to work on. MR. MCDANIEL: Well, anything else you can think of that you want to talk about a little bit? MR. SKINNER: No, I can’t really think, I don’t know. MR. MCDANIEL: I think you’ve given me a lot of information, you know, it’s good to just kind of have your perspective and kind of your story, so I know there’s much more to it than that, but this is kind of the highlights. MR. SKINNER: Well, as I said, that happened a long time ago, and even that write up that I made during the Army days, just for basically for family history, that was written many, many years ago. Each time I look at it, I think of something that’s not quite correct or I forgot, and the more you write, the more you think. MR. MCDANIEL: Where did you all live in Kingston? MR. SKINNER: Well, we lived on the lake right behind Mama Mia’s. Back on Nelson Drive, there’s a dead end over there, we’d gone down. We’d been living in Oak Ridge up on California, and we were about to outgrow the house. This was a B house and we’ve got a boy and a girl. So I was working for a man called Bill Harwell. He was the mayor of Kingston for a while. Anyway, he was my boss. We were looking for a place, we looked in Norris, and we looked out in Edgemore area, and he said, “Well, why don’t you come down to Kingston?” So we went down there one Sunday, and the real estate agent drove us around. She drove us around that little street, she looked at this lot, and said, “Well, that’s awfully steep, I don’t think you’d like it.” Well, that was Sunday, and on Monday, I took my shovel back, and it was real good dirt, and I bought it on Monday. We lived there for 39 years, and then we moved out, we’re out on the lake near Midtown now. [End of Interview]